Social as a platform has failed.

Why IFTTT removing twitter triggers is a warning for developers

Yes, IFTTT is a service beloved by tech nerds, but this change also signals something important about Twitter’s future relationship with developers — something contrary to its previous statements about its recent API changes.

Despite what twitter may or may not have said, it has been clear to me that the twitter API changes over the past few months are a clear warning for developers. This latest move of making IFTTT remove its twitter triggers has to be the death blow for the third party developers community, not just a warning. Come to think of it, the sale of Seesmic to Hootsuite may have been the death blow. In any case,  twitter wants you to use its crappy interfaces and lock you in. They are not a platform. 

And by the way, its not just twitter. Everyone has realized that they have to earn money. All those venture capitalist are looking for returns on their investment. Even Google is doing this with its walled garden that is Google Plus. Facebook, which always was a walled garden, has dumped HTML5 on its mobile app for a native app and are attempting to bring improved targeted advertising to the users of this native app. Companies building on top of social platforms have failed too.  Zyngas stock is down in the dumps even though they actually make money from the virtual goods they sell, etc.

Social as a platform has failed. 

How new versions of successful products lead to failure

Or do they?

New versions of successful products would fail in the past as customers got frustrated with the missing or altered features that they were used to. Dave Winer writes about it here:

People thought we had removed features from ThinkTank, because they had used the Apple II or IBM PC versions. In fact this was a completely new codebase, and we shipped early because there was a lack of software on the Mac. So it didn't have a lot of the features of the earlier product. No matter, the users were outraged by this. They thought they had bought a better computer, and here was the product with less features. We totally didn't anticipate this, because from our point of view it was a major accomplishment to get something out at all.

 He writes about dBase and his own product ThinkTank as historical examples. I'm not sure though that we are living in the same world. dBase and ThinkTank didn't have the advantage that is brought by "Network Effect". In the case of twitter, despite the fact that new twitter clients have missing features and that twitter is actively destroying its third party developer community, I can't leave. All the people and services are "tweeting", and until they all move away en-mass to another service, I can't leave.

Apple doesn't have network effects on its side, but they do have a great brand. I'm not sure if a great brand is as powerful as "network effects", but it sure seems like it is. I guess we'll see.